A Wilder Rose: A Novel

by Susan Wittig Albert

  But when I began to work on her manuscript, I saw how serious the problems were. We had talked about setting the book within the four seasons of the farm year, and she had done that. But there was too much extraneous material, often delivered in indigestible chunks of expository prose. Instead of advancing the action or defining the characters, the anecdotes stopped any forward movement and had nothing at all to do with characterization. Some of the material—a schoolmaster beating a boy with a buggy whip—wasn’t appropriate for children. And the settings—well, they just didn’t seem real. I understood why: my father had no great powers of description and my mother had never visited upper New York State. She grew up on a treeless prairie. She had no idea what the Wilder farm and its surrounding landscapes looked like, still less how they had looked some sixty years ago. Farmer Boy was supposed to be a book about a boy growing up on a farm, but it lacked any real sense of the land.

  Whenever she came over for breakfast or tea, I tried to show her the problems, but each time she refused to listen. I tried on the telephone, too. Once I even got as far as saying, “Mama Bess, I really like the stories you’ve put into Farmer Boy and the loving way you depict the Wilder family. But this story at the very beginning, about the schoolmaster—”

  “Oh, thank you, Rose,” she interrupted. “It always does my heart good to hear you say that you like my writing. And that story about Mr. Corse is your father’s favorite. But I want to read you the thank-you letter I got from your Aunt Grace.”

  Aunt Grace was ill, and she and her husband, Nate Dow, were destitute. Back in February, she had written, begging for help. Mama Bess had sent her what she could afford at the time, and I had chipped in what I could. When my mother had finished reading the thank-you letter (adding that it was a sad day in America when folks couldn’t get by on their own), I tried again to bring the subject back to the book.

  “As I said, Mama Bess, I’m enjoying Farmer Boy. But I really think there are a few adjustments that need to be made, especially in the beginning pages. That’s where Mr. Corse pulls out a blacksnake whip and lashes one of the boys until his clothes are cut to pieces and the blood is flying. Then he kicks him—literally kicks him—out the schoolhouse door. Do you really think this is something that children—”

  “I’m sorry, but your father wants me,” she broke in cheerily. “Just be a dear girl and squeeze in my typing whenever you’re not busy with something else. There’s plenty of time. I don’t have to mail it to Harper until August.” And she hung up.

  To my relief, Lowell Thomas sent an additional packet of manuscript material for the book I was working on, and I had a legitimate excuse for putting Farmer Boy aside. Bunting was sick again, too, so I alternated between taking care of the little dog and working on the book I was ghosting. I finally finished the manuscript in the middle of April and sent it off with the passionate hope that it would be the last job I would do for Lowell Thomas.

  I was celebrating by pulling the winter debris out of the rose garden when my father drove up and dropped my mother off. She was carrying a book and almost dancing. “Rose!” she cried, hurrying toward me. “Rose, it’s here! Little House is here!”

  And so it was. A hardbound book in a thin paper jacket printed with the title and my mother’s name—her full name, Laura Ingalls Wilder. The cover featured a drawing by Helen Sewell of a small log cabin with two little girls peeking out of the front door, two deer and a bear in the yard, and a squirrel on the roof.

  “It’s charming!” I said. “Oh, Mama Bess, I’m so happy for you! Congratulations!”

  “Thank you, Rose,” my mother said, and held the book out in front of her, gazing at it. “At last, it’s beginning to seem real.”

  I put my arm around her shoulders. “Let’s go have a cup of tea, and you can read me a chapter. How about the story of Ma and Laura and the bear, in Chapter Six.”

  “One of my favorites,” my mother said happily. She shook her head, tears coming into her blue eyes. “Oh, how I wish Ma could see that story—in a book. My book.”

  It was a moment to celebrate, and perhaps a good omen. For the next day, I heard from George Bye that George Lorimer, the editor of the Saturday Evening Post, was still interested in “a piece from Mrs. Lane about pioneers.”

  “My very dear Rose,” George wrote, “can’t you come up with something that will make our friend Lorimer lust for your work?”

  I thought immediately of “Courage,” which I had started in October and then laid aside, heartsick at the Palmer bankruptcy and Troub’s leaving. I had picked it up again for a few days in January and worked on it enough to know that it had the potential to turn into something good. But I could see that it was a large project, so I had put it away in favor of the short stories that might produce a quicker return and the ghostwriting for Thomas, which had a deadline. And Farmer Boy. Now, I was excited about it, thinking of what I could do with it, how I could shape the story. I even found myself thinking at odd moments—while I was washing dishes or feeding the chickens—about ways to deepen the characters and make them more complex. I was anxious to get back to it, hoping that it might work for Lorimer and the Post.

  But Harper needed Farmer Boy at the end of August. So I went back to my mother’s manuscript, typing her handwritten pages, aiming to produce a chapter a day. It was frustrating work, since without her agreement, I couldn’t do the kind of serious cutting and editing and rewriting that was needed.

  At one point, early in June, she dropped in for breakfast and I tried once again to show her some of the changes that I wanted to make.

  She only smiled, tilted her chin, and said, very firmly, “Just type it the way I have it, dear. That will be quite good enough.”

  I flinched. The tone of her voice was just as it had been all those years ago, when I was a girl. I would want to do something a new way, a different way, and she would say to me, reprovingly, “No, Rose. Just do as you are told, dear. That will be quite good enough.”

  Finally, toward the middle of June, I was nearly finished typing my mother’s book. I had put in a full thirty days on a project I had little heart for. “Courage” was rising like pulsing yeast, and I had to get back to it.

  The story was a simple one. Charles and Caroline, newly married, have homesteaded a claim in Dakota Territory and are living in a dugout, where their baby boy is born during the winter. The next summer, their wheat crop offers astonishing promise, but drought and a relentless swarm of grasshoppers devastate it. The Svensons, their only neighbors, abandon their claim and leave, defeated by their losses. Charles must leave too, walking back East to earn money and planning to return before winter sets in. But he breaks his leg in an on-the-job accident, and Caroline stays alone with the baby on the claim through the winter, braving not only the storms outside but also the inner storms of fear and uncertainty. When the weather clears, Charles returns and the couple realizes that their success depends on their strength and courage, on their determination to weather nature’s storms. I ended the book with Caroline’s brightly optimistic hope for her infant son, measured by the big white house and acres of wheat fields and fast horses he will own when he is grown up and is enjoying all the rewards that the land has to offer.

  A simple pioneer story, yes. But it was also a story of our times, I thought. “Courage” was my reply to the pessimists who told us that the Depression had wrecked all our dreams. It was a testament to my belief that while political leaders might flounder and fail, ordinary men and women would simply move on, bravely, indomitably, redeeming every disaster by their individual struggles. And even more, it was a personal tribute to my faith in myself. It was the first time I had written something from the heart of me, something I truly believed in. Somewhere along the way I had realized, with a kind of stunned, blinking awareness, that at last I had become a writer, a real writer, with an important message to deliver. Courage. Whatever the storm, we must remain invinc
ible.

  The project had turned into a long, three-part serial, and I worked steadily at it all through July, in spite of the devastating heat, over a hundred in the sleeping porch where I wrote every day, in spite of problems with my teeth, in spite of interruptions by my mother and her friends. I was heartened by a note from George Bye who, sight unseen, said he thought the story would sell, then deeply disheartened by a letter from George Lorimer, saying that the Post didn’t have space for a serial because the issues were now less than normal size and they were trying to give their readers as great a variety as possible.

  And I was truly terrified when I looked at my bank balance and realized that I had less than two months’ living expenses. I had to tell Jess and Mrs. Capper that I could no longer afford to pay their salaries. Jess could work for the rent, at least for a while, but Mrs. Capper left the next Sunday. It was a terrible day. We both wept.

  Such storms, I thought, after she had gone and I was alone. Such storms all around me, within me. I clenched my fists and thought of Caroline and her baby boy, surviving the longest, hardest winter in a prairie dugout, completely alone, with no one to help, no one to depend on. I thought of Rexh at Cambridge, depending on me. Of Mama Bess and Papa counting on me, too.

  Invincible, I reminded myself. I must remain invincible. I went on writing.

  The Sunday night before “Courage” was finished, I walked over to the Rock House for supper. I had already told my parents the basic outline of my story. That night, we sat outside on the porch and talked about the courage it took to defy the elements, to wrest a living from a hard and unforgiving land. My mother said it reminded her of a hymn that her family used to sing, “Let the Hurricane Roar.” She couldn’t remember all the words, but I was struck by the idea. Many Americans had sung that hymn since they were children. They would instinctively feel the powerful faith behind that simple phrase. They would understand what it meant—all that it meant, then and now.

  I went home and retyped the first page of my story, heading it “Let the Hurricane Roar.” That week, I sent the typescript off to George Bye, feeling alternately hopeful and despairing. It had to sell. It had to—but would it?

  Now that “Hurricane” was done, I went back to typing my mother’s manuscript of Farmer Boy. I had come to deeply resent the task, not because I had to do it, or even because it had been such an interruption. I resented it because I wasn’t allowed to do it right—to do the editorial revisions that would have turned a weak manuscript into something strong and good. By the time I handed the typescript to my mother, I could barely stand to look at it.

  I took a few days to recover from the constant, hard pushing that produced both my serial and my mother’s typed manuscript. Then, desperate for cash, I started one story, gave up on it, and started another one—“Country Jake”—with a little more promise. Meanwhile, “Hurricane” was making the rounds of the magazines. I got a telegram from George Bye raving about it, then a plaintive note saying that Woman’s Home Companion wanted it badly but felt it was too long; they just didn’t have the pages for it. The Post had already warned of that, and I was seized with a cold dread. It was possible, even entirely likely, that every magazine in New York would want the story, and still it would end up with no place to go. Invincible, I reminded myself again. Invincible. I went back to “Country Jake.”

  And then, on the Tuesday after Labor Day, I got a wire from George Bye. George Lorimer had decided that the Saturday Evening Post had to have it, after all. They were paying three thousand dollars and would publish it in two installments. George had tried to get them to go higher (it was easily worth ten thousand dollars, he said), but that was the best they could do. He was sure, however, that there would be a book publication as well; he had already talked to Maxwell Aley at Longmans, Green. Aley wanted the book for his spring list, both in the United States and in England. “Hugs, kisses, and congratulations,” George telegraphed.

  I was so excited that I didn’t get to sleep until three in the morning, and the sheer delight of it stayed with me for days. I was glad to have the money, yes—it affirmed the value of the story. But I had written it because it was true. I had written it because I believed that ordinary people would always go on, as my parents and their parents had gone on, with courage and fortitude.

  It was the first thing I had written that I truly believed in. And now, having written it, I could believe in myself.

  Two weeks later, Harper rejected Farmer Boy. I made cinnamon toast and tea, and Mama Bess and I sat at my kitchen table over the letter from her new editor, Ida Louise Raymond.

  It was a hard, hard blow, and my mother kept saying, “But I thought it was such a good book, Rose! I wrote down the stories just as Manly told them—and you know how hard it is to get him to talk.”

  I felt sorry for her, of course, and I tried to comfort her. Rejection is never easy. But I also felt that this particular rejection was the best thing that could have happened, and I was grateful for Miss Raymond’s detailed and decidedly firm revision letter, with instructions for reshaping the manuscript to make it acceptable. She had a sharp critical eye, and she made no secret of her disappointment, sweetening her critique with only the mildest praise.

  My mother had already heard some of the same criticisms from me, but she had danced away from them like a skittish colt refusing the halter. Now, she had to be still and pay attention because the revision instructions came from her editor, and her editor held the purse strings. If she didn’t make the changes Miss Raymond laid out, she would lose not only Farmer Boy but also the third book in her Harper’s contract. Without continuing support from the new books, the sales of Little House in the Big Woods would dwindle away to nothing. She had already begun to hope that, in the long term, these books would free her from her financial dependence on me. It was a hope I shared, with all my heart.

  But she was faced with a hard choice. To become independent in the long run, she would have to depend on me in the short run. I knew it was a bitter pill for her to swallow.

  She tried to get around it by saying in a careless, offhand way, “Well, then, I suppose I’ll have to go over it once more. When I’m finished, if you can spare the time from your work, Rose, maybe you could type it.” She sighed. “Again.”

  “I’ll be glad to,” I said and looked at her squarely. “But I won’t do it unless you let me make the necessary changes.”

  She looked away for a moment. By agreeing, she risked ceding—in her mind, at least—a portion of the ownership of her book. Farmer Boy would be mine as well as hers, even though my name would never be on it. She didn’t like the thought—but she was beginning to see that she would have to live with it.

  She met my eyes and looked away. Then met my eyes again. “Yes,” she said, very quietly. “Yes. Fine. Whatever you have to do to make it acceptable.”

  “Good,” I said and gave her the carbon of the typescript that had gone to Harper. I suggested that she go through and mark the sections that Miss Raymond wanted cut, then rewrite, paying attention to the other criticisms.

  I made another suggestion, too. Miss Raymond had noticed, as had I, the lack of landscape descriptions in the book. My mother had never been to Papa’s boyhood farm home in New York State. New York farm. She couldn’t describe what she had never seen. And she wasn’t the kind of writer who could imagine a setting she had never visited. That would be “fiction.”

  “It’s an entirely understandable problem,” I told my mother, wanting to reassure her. “I know that the task of making word pictures for blind Aunt Mary gave you the gift of description. But in this book, all you have to go on are Papa’s descriptions, and he’s not very free with his words.”

  She bit her lip, her blue eyes troubled. “If I were younger, I’d go and have a look for myself. But as it is, I don’t see how I can manage. Your father would never leave right now, with all the autumn work to be done. And I couldn�
�t go alone.”

  “I just got my check from the Post,” I said, “and I want to go to New York City and see some people. Instead of taking the train, I could drive upstate to the farm where Papa grew up and take notes for you. It’ll only mean an extra week—two, at the outside.”

  My mother sighed. “I hate to see you spend so much of your time on my project,” she said heavily. “But I suppose it has to be done.”

  “I think it does,” I said and poured her another cup of tea.

  She went back to the cinnamon toast on her plate. “Thank you,” she added in a low voice.

  I couldn’t be sure whether she was thanking me for the tea or for the offer of a week’s research at the Wilder farm and the rewrite of her book. But it didn’t matter. The words were sweet.

  “You’re welcome,” I replied and smiled. It felt as if we had achieved some sort of truce.

  Lucille Murphy, always eager for a new adventure (and certainly ready to get away from Eddie for a month or so), volunteered to come along. We left the next week. I was glad for the company and for someone to share the driving. Lucille was a good companion. I thought I was good for her, too, as our conversations often took her outside the bounds of her day-to-day experience.

  Since one purpose for the trip was to gather material for Farmer Boy, we drove north to Spring Valley, in the southeastern corner of Minnesota, where my Wilder grandparents had settled after they left New York State. Papa and Mama Bess and I had spent eighteen months with them in the early 1890s, recuperating after the disastrous last days on the homestead claim. All the Wilders were gone now except Papa and his younger brother, Uncle Perley, who still lived in Louisiana. The grandparents had died long ago, and Aunt E.J. and Uncle Royal, Papa’s older brother, in the last few years.